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How much budget should be allocated to each part of the recruitment marketing cycle, when the cycle is never the same?

The strategy behind figuring this question out is called attribution modelling. There are countless attribution models a recruitment marketer can use to allocate budget depending on the goal.

Now, why is it important? Well, if you spend the entire budget on one stage of the recruitment marketing cycle when multiple touch points are generally required to acquire a new Talent, then money will be wasted and opportunities missed.

To give you an example of how to choose the right attribution model for your unique hiring situation, let’s take a look at the following scenario:

Day #1: Job seeker Anna wants to find a new job as an engineer. Anna types ‘engineer’ jobs into Google and clicks on one of the organic listings on the Google search engine result page and lands on Adzuna website.

Day # 2: Anna continues her search for an engineering job, and clicks on one of the pay-per-click (PPC) ads on Google to land onto Adzuna website again. She then subscribes to Adzuna’s job alert to receive daily EDMs about new engineering jobs on Adzuna.

Day #3: Anna receives an eDM from Adzuna with multiple jobs for engineers. One of the roles looks perfect! Anna clicks on the job and it’s a doozy! She promptly apply’s for the job.

Before we take a look at the different attribution models we could apply to this situation, have a think about which part of the recruitment marketing cycle you would allocate the most budget. Would you allocate half the budget to organic SEO and split the remaining money evenly between PPC and EDMs? Or would you put most of the budget behind that final action, the direct mail out to the jobseeker?

Attribution Models

First Touch Attribution

This attribution model focuses on the first marketing channel or touch point that brings the sales conversion. The organic search channel would receive the credit based on the above scenario example and all of the marketing budget would be spent here.

Reasoning: How do most jobseekers find your job ads? If the answer is SEO, then a strong argument could be made for allocating most, if not all of your marketing budget at this part of the marketing cycle.

Time Decay Attribution

This model is a multi-touch model that gives more credit to the touch-points closest to the conversion. It makes the assumption that the closer to the conversion, the more influence it had on the conversion. In this case, the EDM would be allocated the highest amount of credit for the job application, followed by the PPC and then the organic search.

Reasoning: The argument for using this attribution model is it mirrors human behaviour. The jobseeker finds the job ad and with every ‘buying signal’ they exhibit, we follow suit and allocate more budget to close the deal.

U-Shaped Attribution

This model is a great multi-touch attribution model for marketing teams that focus on lead generation. It’s a multi-touch model that tracks every single touchpoint, but rather than give equal credit to all touch points, it emphasises the importance of two key touch points: the anonymous first touch that got the visitor in the door and the lead conversion touch.

These two touches get 40 percent credit each and the remaining touch points equally split the remaining 20 percent. Using our scenario – 40 percent would be spent on organic search, 20 percent on PPC and 40 percent on EDM marketing.

Reasoning: Without the first touch, no other touches exist. Without the conversion, no other touches matter.

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About Ben Phillips

Ben Phillips heads up job search engine Adzuna's PR & content team. He spends his days hunting for trends in Aussie employment data and attempts to turn tedious numbers into newsworthy stories. Before joining Adzuna, Ben studied journalism at the University of Wollongong and went on to start his career in PR as an account manager for the Telstra Business Awards.